Feds' informant kept stable of secrets

June 27, 2007|By JOHN KASS

Ex-porn merchant William "Red" Wemette was pink and fleshy in his suit and tie in the federal witness box on Tuesday.

As he talked, I thought about a triple homicide of three young boys that the pink man knew something about, even as he worked as a government informant, as the parents of those boys went to their graves not knowing who killed their sons.

In TV courtroom sketches, Red Wemette will be fixed like some insect on a pin, a witness in the Operation Family Secrets prosecution against top members of the Chicago Outfit, featuring 18 unsolved mob assassinations.

In the flesh, Wemette was sober and composed, saying he feared death if he didn't pay street tax to Outfit enforcer Frank "the German" Schweihs. Behind him, on a grainy video tape, Wemette was giggling, excited as he paid off Schweihs for protecting his North Side pornography business.

Schweihs was an Outfit ape on those tapes as Wemette snickered. You can hear it for yourself and read the transcripts of Schweihs' extortion trial by going to the federal prosecutor's Web site at www.usdoj.gov/usao/iln/hot/familySecrets.html.

As the pink man giggled, I thought of those three boys and what he knew, and how he could have been silent for so long.

Their murders terrified this city and changed things here forever. But their bodies became dust long before the Internet, so it is easy to forget, avoid, ignore. Those killings were fused into Chicago's spiritual infrastructure, and just like the sewers and pipes, cable lines and cement pilings driven into bedrock, it's not noticed, but it's there.

You've read stories about today's overprotective parents and grandparents, how they hover and structure their children's lives, organizing play dates, stage-managing their kids from waking to sleep, and most of us don't think about how such attitudes developed.

We don't think about what Wemette knew of what happened in a horse barn in unincorporated Park Ridge on Oct. 16, 1955 -- the Schuessler-Peterson Murders.

Bobby Peterson, 14, John Schuessler, 13, and his brother Anton, 11, told their parents they were going to the movies. Two days later, their naked bodies were found near a forest preserve bridle path. The youngest had been sexually assaulted. They'd been beaten and strangled.

Despite thousands of cops and their task forces, some 43,000 interviews, and manic media pressure, their killers weren't found.

Anton Schuessler Sr. became a suspect in the killings of his sons. He was questioned harshly by police, then put into a psychiatric institution for electroshock therapy. The broken man died of a heart attack one month after his sons were murdered.

Many years later, after Schweihs was sent to prison for extortion where he belonged, after Wemette testified against him, Wemette testified in another case.

It was the case against his old friend and lover, Kenneth Hansen, accused of the Schuessler-Peterson killings. Hansen and his brother Curt were part of a crew of horse people, running livery stables, working for the notorious horseman Silas Jayne, himself connected to the Chicago Outfit, and through the Outfit, Jayne had political clout.

Gene O'Shea is the author of a book on the killings, titled "Unbridled Rage" (Berkley/Penguin Books).

O'Shea, a former investigative reporter and current spokesman for the Illinois Gaming Board, is now working on another Outfit book, about the murder of candy heiress Helen Brach and how the late Michael and Tony Spilotro may have been indirectly involved in her death.

"Red stayed with Kenny Hansen for a few years. One night [in the 1960s], they're drinking, and Ken tells him how he murdered the [Schuessler and Peterson] boys, how he and his brother almost screwed up and left evidence," O'Shea said.

Wemette testified against Hansen in 1994. When that conviction was overturned, Hansen was retried, convicted again and sentenced to between 200 and 300 years behind bars.

What's unclear is how long Wemette kept silent about the Schuessler-Peterson murders. Some accounts have him telling federal authorities almost immediately after he began working with them in the late 1970s. Others say it happened later.

Investigators for the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms were working the Schuessler-Peterson killings in a cold-case file. The FBI was working on the Chicago Outfit, and Wemette was one of their key informants, as you can see if you go to the link I suggested.

O'Shea's book illustrates that Outfit killers like "Mad" Sam DeStefano would ride horses at the Jayne stables, firing off six shooters like a movie cowboy.

If the FBI had released Wemette to be a witness in the Schuessler-Peterson killings, he'd have been exposed and murdered. Once his work as an informant was done, he testified.

"Red's had a rough life," O'Shea said. "He's an opportunist. And he decided to come forward and help on the Schuessler-Peterson murders. Did he drop it out of the goodness of his heart? Or did he do it to help Red Wemette? Only Red knows."